Lit Hub Daily: December 15, 2020
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: In 1913, Muriel Rukeyser, poet and political activist, is born.
- “Big Manhattan book publishers publish hundreds of authors each year, but in their eyes, only a very few really matter.” Richard Jean So on the inertia of whiteness in postwar print culture. | Lit Hub History
- The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List (in which we read all the year-end lists so you don’t have to). | Lit Hub
- New titles from Jenny Offill, Garth Greenwell, Hillary Mantel, Elena Ferrante, and Brit Bennett all feature among the Best Reviewed Fiction of 2020. | Lit Hub, Book Marks
- “As is so often the case, editorial passion conquered timid conventional wisdom, and literature was born.” Gerald Howard on the glory days of the trade paperback. | Lit Hub Design
- “Butler’s books have always been categorized as science fiction, an apt description but one that has pigeonholed her work.” On the challenge of creating a new generation of Octavia Butler covers. | Lit Hub Design
- Historical whodunnits, college coverups, and heart-wrenching memoirs: the best true crime books of 2020. | CrimeReads
- The ultimate stage dad: on young Mozart’s life with Leopold, and the origins of his First Symphony. | Lit Hub Music
- “The longer we are denied what we took for granted, the more intensely we yearn for it.” Anuradha Roy on the importance of companionship, animal and human both. | Lit Hub Health
- “If he does still walk, his image is one more akin to a mossy dryad, a figure of intertwined bark, than a spectral image of a ghost.” Adam Scovell in praise of literature’s master of scary stories, M.R. James. | Lit Hub
- “Book publishing in 2020 was a story of how much an industry can change and how much it can, or wants to, remain the same.” On the publishing upheavals of 2020. | AP
- Alexandra Kleeman on the importance of consistency during a pandemic. | Frieze Magazine
- “We definitely look forward to the holidays in the same way that movie studios look forward to blockbusters.” Los Angeles booksellers say this holiday season is particularly high-stakes for business. | Los Angeles Times
- A brief history of swimming-pool photography and what it tells us about publishing, culture, and the imagination. | Los Angeles Review of Books
- K-Ming Chang on the freedom of wearing what you want, “the ultimate act of agency and self-creation.” | Guernica
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